Collaborative Research: Concurrent Design Integration of Products and Remanufacturing Processes for Sustainability and Life Cycle Resilience

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Remanufacturing serves as an important strategy to salvage the value put into a product during manufacturing therefore reducing the environmental impact of the product. However, few products are currently designed for remanufacturing and further there is rarely any feedback from remanufacturing being used to improve product designs. Design and post-design remanufacturing decisions have traditionally been made separately, leading to suboptimal performance over the product’s life cycle. There is an urgent need of new design theory and tools to facilitate concurrent decision making considering both design and remanufacturing. Research funded by this award attempts to addresses such a need by developing a new product design platform, enabled by several technical innovations in predictive modeling, machine learning, and design optimization, for concurrent design integration of products and remanufacturing processes of multiple life cycle products for enhanced sustainability and resilience. The technical innovations will address critical challenges in remanufacturing with respect to repair policy analysis, end-of-life product damage detection, remanufacturing inspection, optimum repair policies as well as design and remanufacturing integration. Platform validation will be carried out by working with an industrial partner on an agricultural vehicle hydraulic manifold design application. This research will integrate the newly generated knowledge into education and outreach activities, emphasizing broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in sustainable design science.The research objective of this project is to create a new product design platform for designing multi-life cycle products while concurrently considering their remanufacturing processes. To close the gap between two decision making problems that are currently separately considered in product design and product remanufacturing processes, the research will be conducted within three research tasks: (1) quantification and allocation of remanufacturing resilience, which will derive a remanufacturing resilience measure for the first time and formulate a novel top-level resilience allocation problem; (2) remanufacturing co-design for repairability, which will formulate a new bottom-level remanufacturing co-design problem for the detailed design of components and their remanufacturing repair policies; and (3) design of remanufacturing inspection processes, which will create a new bottom-level design methodology for automated remanufacturing inspection systems. If successful, this research will lay the important foundation for a paradigm shift from the traditional approach of separate decision-making for product design and end-of-life considerations to a holistic framework for concurrent product design and remanufacturing process integration.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.